'We're already fighting yesterday's battle': Greece's prime minister gets candid about AI | TechCrunch
Short summary
Greece's prime minister visited San Francisco to attract tech investment and was unusually candid about not having answers to AI's societal challenges. He acknowledged that governments are scrambling to keep pace with AI's speed and effects on jobs, education, and human development.
- Greece is positioning itself as a tech hub after its debt crisis recovery—it now borrows more cheaply than the U.S., regains developed market status next year, and is offering tax breaks and visa programs to lure talent and companies back.
- Mitsotakis admitted governments are behind the curve on AI policy; Greece's ban on social media for under-15s may already be obsolete given AI chatbots, and he warned that job displacement will happen faster than any society is prepared for.
- He called for AI development to slow down and backed "smart regulation," arguing that if AI lab leaders admit uncertainty about how their models work, policymakers need to listen rather than pretend to have solutions.
Full summary
Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis visited San Francisco to recruit tech companies and talent back to Greece, which is poised to regain developed market status next year. He made a straightforward economic pitch: Greece is paying down debt faster than expected and now borrows more cheaply than the U.S. (10-year bonds at 4.3% versus American Treasuries around 5%), a stunning reversal from 2012 when Greek yields hit 40% during the debt crisis. The country has also spent roughly €36 billion from the EU's post-COVID recovery fund on digital infrastructure—including an online government portal and a supercomputer being built near Athens with Hewlett Packard Enterprise's help. To sweeten the deal for tech companies, Greece has changed stock option taxation, loosened labor laws, and offers returning Greeks tax breaks of up to seven years. His core goal is winning back the younger citizens who fled during the crisis when opportunities dried up.
What made Mitsotakis stand out was his candor about AI policy—he admitted he doesn't have finished answers. Greece is banning social media for kids under 15 starting January, but he acknowledged this move may already be obsolete given how addictive AI chatbots are. He's run an education pilot with OpenAI to reduce teacher workload and sees value in personalized tutors, yet he's wary about students using chatbots to skip actual learning. On data centers, he noted Greece is an outlier—the country welcomes them while other nations resist their electricity and water demands. Microsoft is building a cluster near Athens, and AWS recently announced its largest Greek data center in a former coal region. But he was blunt about job displacement: "it's going to happen, and no government and no society is prepared for the speed."
On whether AI development should slow down, Mitsotakis sided with the frontier lab leaders calling for caution. He argued that if the people building these models admit they're unsure how they work—especially how they improve themselves—governments need to listen. Some form of regulation is coming, he said, and the U.S. will largely shape it. He pitched Athens as the ideal place to host these conversations, bringing together technologists, philosophers, historians, and social scientists. The irony isn't lost: Socrates once debated justice and the good life in the agora; maybe the same plaza will host humanity's reckoning with artificial intelligence.